Lunde Testifies About After-School Programs
Brooklyn Park Mayor Jeff Lunde testified before the House Education and Finance Committee. He hopes to encourage youth after-school programs. His city already has successful programs like Zanewood Rec Center and the Brooklyn Bridge Alliance.
Lunde hopes the legislature will devote twelve million dollars toward youth programs statewide. He says programs like Brooklyn Park’s work, and they have the numbers to prove it.
“The fact is that we’ve seen results that initially started out as lowering youth crime dramatically,” says Lunde. Now, he says, the city’s conversations are turning beyond crime. “What kind of opportunities are we missing? What we’ve found is, it’s not that crime is an outcome. The cause is actually lack of hope. So where kids feel value they tend to put that value somewhere else by doing better in school. Positive activities.”
Lunde says Brooklyn Park tracks statistics on the effectiveness of its youth programming, which should help convince the legislature that they’re worth funding.
